The Happiest of Days

'You see Wendy,' he said, 'when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.'

As my friends here at The Hedge know, I really, really love books. I have 2 very special books I treasure from my childhood, big beautiful story books with the loveliest colour plates complementing the text. The first one I found tucked in my Santa Stocking as a 7 year old in 1962. It was J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy. Barrie requested that Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrate this particular 1921 edition. Miss Attwell was a well known British illustrator of children's books & her cute, nostalgic drawings were often based on her young daughter Peggy. I remember being smitten with the book & enjoying it immensely.

Then 2 weeks later on my birthday, I received the companion book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Inscribed on the title page in my Mum's very distinctive hand-writing is 'To dear Millie on her 8th Birthday with lots & lots of love from Mummy & Daddy xx'. Published in 1906 this was Barrie's first book in the Peter Pan series & famous British artist Arthur Rackham was the illustrator. On opening this book I knew immediately here was something else entirely. Rackham's haunting & dreamlike artistic style was very, very different to Attwell's work. I immersed myself totally in each picture, if fact little Millie glided into each of them & became part of the composition. The joy his work gave me was overwhelming.

I wanted to share some of the work of both artists from the books. I'd love to hear your thoughts on their individual illustrative styles & your favourite image.

Illustrations by Mabel Lucie Attwell

Peter kept watch

They are the children who fall out of their perambulators

They don't want us to land

A Mermaid caught Wendy

The Never Bird

The House under the Ground

The Strange procession set off

When he had freed Wendy

When Wendy grew up

Ilustrations by Arthur Rackham

The Serpentine is a lovely lake, and there is a drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge you can see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there are also drowned stars in it

Old Mr. Salford was a crab-apple of an old gentleman who wandered all day in the Gardens


Away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens


A band of workmen, who were sawing down a toadstool, rushed away, leaving their tools behind them


There now arose a mighty storm, and he was tossed this way and that


When they think you are not looking they skip along pretty lively


These tricky fairies sometimes slyly change the board on a Ball night


The fairies sit round on mushrooms, and at first they are well behaved


Peter Pan is the fairies' orchestra

The little people weave their summer curtains from skeleton leaves

Fairies never say, 'We feel happy': what they say is, 'We feel dancey'

Image 1: Wiki (of Michael Llewelyn-Davies) All other images: J.M. Barrie